The deal with FTL.

[Alcaste]

Alright, I've had FTL: Faster Than Light for a long while now. I've played it for about 20 hours total give or take. I'm seeing the draw, but not much else.

It seems like it's too focused on luck, and I've got really bad luck... Or something. I need some insight here. Seeing all the possible ships to unlock makes me really want to unlock them, to have something new to do, but every time I get close to unlocking one (or it seems I am) it just doesn't work out.

I've only unlocked the rock ship (on a fluke, it was my first couple playthroughs) and I've got both of the layouts for it and the starting ship. I WANT to get more into the game, but it's tough with such a limited selection to start with.

I have yet to survive a playthrough, though yes I've gotten to the end so I know what's up. I've played through several times building up as much as I could for that final fight, but just... Not pulling through. Does anyone have any insight or tips for me, or is my luck just that bad?

 

[Shinsei-J]

Vent everything!
Keep your oxygen going!
And keep a towel.
...
That's all I got, I'm basically in the same ship as you. [sub]hehe[/sub]
The games a mixture of skill and luck that can be as unforgiving as a mother in-law.
I have terrible luck as well but I just keep playing because god damn it I'm not going to be beat damn it.
Good luck on your next run, you'll need it.

 

[Ryotknife]

the RNG screws me over so hard in that game...

sometimes i only make it a few jumps in the first sector before i die (lack of crew...)

 

[Alhazred]

Not two minutes before posting this, I just got slaughtered by the rebel flagship. That thing is an utter monstrosity. Four bars of shield, a missile launcher that fires three times, a cloaking device, and a small army of crewmembers quite capable of teleporting on board and fucking your shit up whenever they please. At that point my Kestrel cruiser was out of missiles, and the only other weapons were two burst lasers that could barely get through the shield.

I think a more subtle approach is called for; perhaps the Engi ship has the solution...

 

[Kopikatsu]

My main problem with FTL is that everything is randomized, so there are a vast number of playthoughs where it is literally impossible to unlock a certain ship. Just bugs me.

 

[Alcaste]

In my best run I managed to kill almost the entire crew of the mothership, the first phase was easy. It's those damned drones. I feel like I can't manage ALL the different methods that it comes at you.

I know it's more about playing the game rather than beating it. I have over 200 hours in Dungeons of Dredmor and I still haven't beat it. I just wish there was more variety between playthroughs in FTL when I can't seem to unlock ships

 

[Doom972]

According to Steam, I logged 17 hours into the game. It doesn't seem too focused on luck to me, because I seem to get gradually better, and not get extremely better or worse at any playthrough.

My strategy involves the following:

1) After an event, I check the map - if there's a store nearby, I don't get upgrades and spend all my scrap on fixes and then fuel. If there is no store, I get upgrades if I can.

2) Upgrade the non power-consuming systems to second rank before upgrading anything else - blast doors come first.

The rest is just trying to adapt and survive.

I've yet to finish it myself, but I don't worry too much about it.

 

[Terminal Blue]

It seems like it's too focused on luck, and I've got really bad luck...

The point is to make the best of what you have.

That's part of the fun. You can't rely on an invincible winning strategy because you can't depend on getting the components to pull it off, you have to try to wing it with what you have and use what you have to the best of your ability. The "fun" of the game is really in managing risk. As you get better, you'll learn how to minimize the risk but you'll never fully eliminate it. Sometimes, you will be dashed to pieces at the last hurdle, or something will throw a ridiculous curve ball you never saw coming, but next time you'll go back in expecting that and maybe you'll prepare for it a little better.

My suggestions for unlocking ships.

1) There is no shame in switching the game to "easy". It is much, much easier to unlock ships on easy than it is on normal.

2) Certain ships require a really unusual combination of upgrades, crewmembers and behaviours. If you look at the description of each ship, it will give you some tips. But here's a few more non-spoilery ones.

* The stealth cruiser is being built by the Engi, so you need someone who can communicate with the engi.
* The Mantis Cruiser (my personal favourite) is for those who like boarding.. so to get it you'll need to follow a boarding strategy. Teleporter, med-bay and marines.
* The slugs are all about sensing enemies and killing their crew without damaging the ship, so to get the slug ship you'll need some way to do both. Remember, information is more valuable than firepower!
* The Zoltan are hippies. React accordingly.

3) You don't need any of these ships to beat the game. In fact, the starting Kestrel is more than capable of doing so. They'll provide very different starting position and tactics though, so they're good for fun but won't necessarily give you a huge advantage. The game is always incredibly hard, it's part of the genre.

Personally, I beat the game by killing all the crew on the final boss in the first fight and then fire-bombing all its rooms in each encounter so it couldn't self-repair. Once the shield room was burned out, pew pew pew!

 

[Alcaste]

I'm totally familiar with the genre, DCSS and Dungeons of Dredmor being some of my favorite games. The big difference between them and FTL is that there's immediate variety right at the start, which I like. It makes it less monotonous when dying over and over.

I'm going to give it another few hours today and see what I can come up with. I've gotten close to unlocking the crystal ship and the zoltan ship, but the opportunities for the others almost never seem to come up. I can consistently get to the end with the kestrel (the red-tail, as awesome as it is, never seems to cut it).

So, off into space I go. Here's hoping I suffocate some of the time

A few tips:

1. Go to options, turn on seeing the jump lanes.

Oh. I love you.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

At this moment I've unlocked all ships except the B version of stealth and crystal.

A few tips:

1. Go to options, turn on seeing the jump lanes.

A. Get one or two engine upgrades early. An extra 10% chance to dodge really helps and trains your pilot and engineer much faster. Then together when fully skilled, they'll give another 8% chance to dodge.
B. If a ship isn't capable of damaging yours, you can continually take power out of and into shields. This will effect as a recharge and train the shield recharge. This one is a bit tedious and shield recharge isn't that good, but hey, if you have trouble surviving, do anything right?
C. A low recharge time laser or ion weapon are perfect for training your weapons guy.

Beating the boss:

1. Save a missile or bomb weapon, they're great against the final boss.
2. Take out it's third weapon room and guy asap.


I can beat the game on normal about once out of six runs now. On easy one out of two runs.

Don't give up!

sweet jesus these are helpful, i've had an engi ship that could please the kree empire and have it get wiped like a booger from the screen from all those drones the boss gives off. will have to remember these next time i'm playing.

 

[Ryotknife]

It seems like it's too focused on luck, and I've got really bad luck...

The point is to make the best of what you have.

That's part of the fun. You can't rely on an invincible winning strategy because you can't depend on getting the components to pull it off, you have to try to wing it with what you have and use what you have to the best of your ability. The "fun" of the game is really in managing risk. As you get better, you'll learn how to minimize the risk but you'll never fully eliminate it. Sometimes, you will be dashed to pieces at the last hurdle, or something will throw a ridiculous curve ball you never saw coming, but next time you'll go back in expecting that and maybe you'll prepare for it a little better.

that all well and good, except the computer cheats....horrendously.

Just finished a game where I was up against a ship with two shields with 5 laser attacks. My ship had 3 shields and a 40% dodge rate. I had 2 weapons with 3 laser burst (6 burst total) and a missile launcher with only 5 missiles.

All the missiles missed, and all I needed was for 50% of my lasers to hit in order to do any damage.

Never hit him once. This extreme bad luck RNG happens way way WAY too often. It is for this reason that I will probably never get Xcom. RNG games dont work for people who dont have any luck at all.

 

[Yojoo]

I logged about 70 hours of playtime on FTL before getting bored, I love that game.

Regarding the Drone Swarm that the flagship fires: A level 2-3 cloaking device neatly counters it. Pop cloak as soon as you get a power surge warning, and the drones will disperse before you become visible again.

Also, the Kestrel and Engi cruisers are capable of beating the boss, but you might have better luck with other cruisers. Try playing on Easy to unlock more ships (no shame, trust me). Once you get the hang of the Mantis ship, for example, the boss is a pushover.

 

[Loop Stricken]

Thirty hours.

Drone systems are godly, but don't bother with the mk2 defence drones. Eating lasers is your shields' job, not the drones'.

 

[Tuxedoman]

I think I put about 30 hours into it before I got bored, but I have to say I had a great time until that time.

But yeah. It isn't the destination, its getting there. Thats the same for most rougelike games really; you're probably going to die, but you're going to have one hell of an adventure getting there.

For example, I would always give my starting crew the same names whenever I played, and without fail for my first three or so attempts the same guy would die in some BS event where I searched for survivors on a space station, or went down to a planets surface.

Its enjoyable for a while, but it does get old eventually.

 

[Alcaste]

I'm totally fine with dying over and over, I just wish I could more often change up the method of suicide. I played through all the way to the last sector three times today and never once had a chance to unlock another ship... Maybe I'm just choosing the wrong options.

 

[Kilo24]

There's a large amount of luck, although like in any good roguelike good play mitigates it considerably. Making good choices will drastically improve your chances of beating the game.

One of the biggest traps in the game is to think that you're trying to get to the end as quickly as possible. You're not. By not exploring as many areas as possible before the rebels catch up to you, you're cheating yourself out of a number of rewards at easier difficulties than the next sector will have. However long you take in one sector doesn't affect the speed of the rebels in the next sector.

Don't trust the difficulty setting names. Easy is Hard, and Normal is Very Hard.

Relying on missiles or drones as the primary damage-dealer is a bad idea for every fight because they rely on expendable resources. Even if you spend little more than you're getting, you'll regret it when you run out of ammo in the final boss (or regret it earlier as you spend a massive amount of scrap to buy more resources.) The automated drone recovery arm fixes this problem for drones.

Boarding ships and killing off the crew will net you more scrap and better rewards than destroying ships would. Even though it's really not advisable against automated ships, dedicating to that as a strategy early often pays off in the long run. And it gets past shields effortlessly. Boarding drones are not a good substitute because you can't control where they hit and what they target. If you've got a 4 man teleporter (Mantis Ship B, Crystal Ship B) and/or crystal crew members, boarding gets a good increase in effectiveness. Just make sure that all your crew members are off a ship before it explodes or warps away.

Anti-ship drones work very well for destroying hulls if you can get enough firepower to overwhelm the shields - but eat up your resources to use. Automated Drone Recovery Arms fix this problem very effectively, but it's still better to kill off ships' crew if you can for the bonus scrap.

As far as the rebel flagship goes:

Moreso than any other fight in the game, it's a matter of endurance. You might be able to get away with only one effective offensive tactic or poor defenses before this (such as mostly relying on stealth), but the flagship will kill you if you keep that up.

Destroying the weapons on the rebel flagship makes it a lot easier, even though you'll need to do it for each stage. It's most efficient to do so with the crew teleporter, but small bombs and missiles also work quite well (although missiles don't work well against the defense drone in stage 2.) However, I wouldn't recommend destroying all the weapons because...

Crew members stay dead between stages. This means that it's usually worth drawing out the first stage to kill off all but one of the crew members. Why all but one? Once all crew members die off, an AI will take over the flagship and start automatically repairing everything. So, leaving one alive carries less headaches in the long run. I prefer keeping the guy on the triple laser (2nd from the left) alive because he'll stay alive for all 3 stages of the battle and you can always soak the damage with 3+ shields.

I personally always go for maximum shields by the time I get to the flagship. And I've never regretted it. 3 shields is probably workable, but I don't like risking it. Any lower is suicide.

 

[gigastar]

I approach games like FTL the same way I approach games like Nethack- winning the game is not a realistic goal. Playing the game is the goal. The point is to enjoy the journey, and winning the game is just a way to give that journey direction.

You, sir, have it right there.

The goal of theese rougelikes is not the objective, but the journey on the way to the objective.

 

[Professor Lupin Madblood]

I approach games like FTL the same way I approach games like Nethack- winning the game is not a realistic goal. Playing the game is the goal. The point is to enjoy the journey, and winning the game is just a way to give that journey direction.

This. Roguelikes are an extremely unforgiving kind of game, but they're fun as hell when done correctly, and FTL is most definitely done correctly.

That said, it does help to know what works well against what. There's a YouTuber by the name of AlpacaPatrol who has a series of videos on FTL where he starts out from pretty much your situation and eventually becomes very adept at it. They're rather informative, if you can spare the time to watch a few.

Don't worry too much about getting achievements unless you're specifically trying to get them. It's very difficult unless you go specifically for an achievement run.

Not two minutes before posting this, I just got slaughtered by the rebel flagship. That thing is an utter monstrosity. Four bars of shield, a missile launcher that fires three times, a cloaking device, and a small army of crewmembers quite capable of teleporting on board and fucking your shit up whenever they please. At that point my Kestrel cruiser was out of missiles, and the only other weapons were two burst lasers that could barely get through the shield.

I think a more subtle approach is called for; perhaps the Engi ship has the solution...

Rebel flagship fun fact: the weapon rooms only have one crew member in them and are cut off from the rest of the ship. If you kill the crew member in a room and disable the gun, it isn't coming back online, period. The Engi ship does work wonders, though. Drones are the flagship's largest weakness.

Never hit him once. This extreme bad luck RNG happens way way WAY too often. It is for this reason that I will probably never get Xcom. RNG games dont work for people who dont have any luck at all.

You're only really allowed to complain about accuracy if you target the pilot/engine rooms after missing a lot. Taking out either will eliminate the opposing ship's dodge chance entirely.

 

[Kilo24]

I personally always go for maximum shields by the time I get to the flagship. And I've never regretted it. 3 shields is probably workable, but I don't like risking it. Any lower is suicide.

Inspired by this thread to pick up ftl again, I just did my first succesful run with a stealth cruiser (on easy).

I had only 2 shields and I only took 2 damage on the first two stages.

How? Natural dodge of 48%, lvl 3 cloak (activated always just when an attack that would damage me was underway... and not firing my guns until it completed) and a high attack loadout (teleport 2 mantis, laser mk 3, mk 1 and dual laser, as well as attack drone mk 1 and mk 2)

I have to admit, I was continually juggling power, rarely having both attack drones online. Since I had 2 zoltan in shield room, there was only limited danger from ion and thus beam. I took out the missile asap, then beam. It's a pussycat really.
4.

You got lucky, and probably micromanaged the hell out of those thrusters. You had to contend with the triple-shot beam, the missiles, the drone swarms, and the super six-shot beam - any of which could damage your ship if stealth was on cooldown and you got unlucky dodge rolls. Stealth doesn't recharge quickly enough for you to avoid them all (and at level 3, doesn't recharge quickly enough to avoid all the super weapons in stages 2/3.) That's ignoring the other weapons and the drones that aren't part of the super weapon at stage 2 also whittling at your shields, too. A lucky shot or boarding drone damaging your shields, thrusters, stealth system, or cockpit could have screwed you over when combined with everything else.

I did exaggerate in calling 2 shields suicide, but one does not win roguelikes by taking unnecessary risks. You can do really well by juggling power on engines (especially where drones are concerned), but that's gambling that you'll dodge the weapons rather than guaranteeing that you'll take none.

But, enough with the criticism and pessimism. The mere fact that you won is quite a big indicator that your strategies are fundamentally working. Congratulations on finally beating FTL, and enjoy the new ship! (On a random note, the stealth cruiser was also my first successful run even though it seems like most people's first was the Engi ship.)

 

[TrevHead]

I don't mean to sound like a dick but FTL is kinda easy once you figure out how the mechanics and stats work, as long as you know what you are doing so you don't take damage to the hull and maximise the collection scrap. Not that i'm calling the game bad or anything as I had a great time while I was learning the game and one of my favorite games of this year.